A Few Tips on Revising Academic Papers
If you’ve been asked to revise and resubmit a paper for an academic journal, congratulations! Here are some tips for people new to the revision process about what you need to do and how it works.
Tag: science
Writing an Original Research Article as a Story
I approach the structure of an academic research article similarly to how I approach a piece of fiction. I shared this with a student the other day, and am elevating it from “Random Email I’ll Lose” to “Blog Post I Can Link Back To.”
I like to think of an original research report like a story: The first “chapter”—Background—sets up the characters, setting, and conflict—why was it urgent to do this research? What pressures are building, what gaps exist, what is troublesome about existing knowledge, who is yelling that problems are unaddressed and why? That chapter ends with, “therefore, because of these conflicts/tensions/gaps/needs, we decided to do a study to address them through these research aims.” Or, to go forth on a journey to resolve these conflicts through the objectives of the study.
The second “chapter”—Methods—is like equipping your heroes and sending them out to achieve those necessary objectives. We therefore took these bold actions to resolve the conflict! March forth and design, recruit, collect, analyze! Do the study thing! Here is how we did it.
The third “chapter”—Results—is the climax chapter. It says what actually happened in the study. What was the result of that journey?
The final “chapter”—Discussion—is the resolution chapter. It ties up all the loose ends. It summarizes what happened on the journey and then ties it back to why you had to go forth in the first place, which is introduced first in the Background. It’s where you conclude how the gaps were filled (or not), the troublesome ideas adjusted (or not), the problems addressed (or not). How did the result of the journey change the world? Or, at least, how did it change the current state of the science, literature, practice, policy, and community? 🙂
Thinking of the research in this way may help provide some structure, and also make it more engaging to read. No, I am not recommending turning the paper into a literary work full of hyperbole and action sequences! But readers can more easily follow a narrative where the pieces relate to each other clearly. I have also found it easier to write when I consider the process of conducting original research as a narrative arc. HTH <3
Avoiding some early errors in academic writing
By chance, I’ve done a lot of mentoring lately about academic writing. Earlier I posted about rejection. This post is just a collection of random n00b-type things that I’ve found myself explaining to students a lot. Now I can just direct them here bwahaha
Disclaimer: My experience with academic writing and publishing is primarily within applied social science journals related to public health, social work, medicine, psychology, systems science, disability, and engineering. I can’t speak to how to write an effective paper in other fields such as philosophy or the humanities.
I. Pick a journal before you start
Before you start writing, the single most important step to take is to pick your journal. DO NOT just sit down to write something. Every journal has specific types of articles they will take, specific formats for those articles, and a specific scope or spin that they are interested in publishing. Not only will this give a structure to work within which makes things easier, it will save you time because you will not need to rewrite the article after you pick the journal.
To consider when picking a journal:
- Where do you want the paper to be published?
- Who do you want to have read it?
- Where do you think it will have the most influence / do the most good?
- Which journal scopes fit your aims?
- Which journals publish the type of paper you want to write?
- Which journals publish papers on the type of research you have conducted or the type of methods you have used?
Pick the highest impact journal that you have a chance of getting into.
II. Understanding an article type and writing to its format.
After you pick a journal, look at what that journal lists for article types. Find the one that matches what you want to write, and then read the instructions very carefully. For the journal Autism in Aduthood (AIA) which I edit for, these appear in a table under the heading “Manuscript Types and Word Limits.” AIA includes short descriptions of each article type and word limits in the table. After the table, AIA provides highly detailed specific instructions for each paper type, including specific internal structures. Many journals provide this information in their “For Authors” sections. If you are not sure which article type would fit what you’re interested in writing, it’s okay to contact the editor and ask.
After you pick an article type, go to the currently published issues of the journal and read other articles of that same type. That will help show what, exactly, the editors mean and are looking for in those types of articles. Again, you can also contact the editor for clarification if the examples don’t help.
III. Academic writing style
A. Don’t use clichés and colloquialisms. For example, “paint a picture” or “It can be seen…”
B. Don’t use language that makes assumptions about the reader. For example, “clearly,” “obviously,” “easily,” “it stands to reason,” etc.
C. Don’t use overly complex language, which can obscure meaning or hide clarity. Bigger words are not always better words. Flowery language will also steal from the word count you will desperately need to report your work and makes your points, and it make the paper hard to read. (Disclaimer again: some fields may be more agreeable to flowery, complex language–applied social science and health literature is typically not).
D. Do not under-state or over-state things with your use of language. Own your own work with strong verbs. “We did this” not “We attempted this.” Do not make strong statements about the world without a citation. “All people do this.” Really? ALL of them? You know this how? “Most people” is a much more accurate statement unless you have a citation that backs up the strength of the statement. Likewise, your findings, though they may be powerful and compelling, are never absolute because science is not absolute. And there are limitations to every study. Unless it’s a mathematical proof, the findings are never “This proves that people…” but “This shows that people like those in our study…”
E. Write in active voice unless the journal explicitly instructs you not to. Passive voice obscures the actor, and makes things harder and more boring to read. DON’T say, “The interviews were conducted.” DO say, “Our research assistant, who is also a member of the community, conducted the interviews.” See how much more important information is given in the active voice! Using active voice does not “bias” the science; it gives greater transparency to the science.
IV. Writing for an academic audience
A. Know your audience. In the case of AIA one is writing to autism researchers. The audience knows basic research methods, they are used to reading academic papers, and they expect particular structures to those papers. They know what autism is and, while they may not have a nuanced view of it from inside, they understand its nuances better than researchers from other fields. Some of readers may be autistic themselves. Some may be autistic-rights and strengths oriented. Some may be heavily medical-model. They are interested in learning something new in the field of autism and adulthood, with which they are already familiar. This will greatly influence choices about where to spend time explaining things in the paper. Other journals will have other audiences–if I’m writing for a systems science journal I may need to spend more time describing what autism is than if I’m writing for AIA, but for AIA I will need to spend more time explaining systems science concepts.
B. There is a difference between writing for teachers and writing for academic journals. When you write for teachers, you need to prove your knowledge–you’re trying to demonstrate that you learned the things they wanted you to learn. When you write for an academic journal, you can assume that your audience already believes you know what you are talking about, and is already familiar with basic research methods and ideas. For example, we all know the implications of a convenience sample on the generalizability of a study. It doesn’t need to be explained. You just need to say, “we used a small convenience sample” and the reader goes oh, okay, results could be different in a large, random, population-based study where people who have no interest in the topic are participating. The places to spend word count and provide deeper explanations are novel ideas. For example, my study on autistic burnout had to spend extra time discussing what that term was and why we were studying it as it previously was not represented in the literature.
IV. Use outlines and standard structures. Seasoned readers expect certain structures. It helps us more easily read and absorb the meat of the article. Some paper types have pretty consistent structures no matter what journal they’re for, like original research papers or reviews (maybe I’ll post those structures later). Other academic paper types, including theoretical papers, are a bit more fluid but not tons. Most start with necessary background to understand why the topic of the paper is important and why the work reported on in the paper needed to be done (gaps in the current state of the science), then they get at the meat of the new work that’s being reported on, and then conclude with a summary of what was learned followed by an in-depth look at how it changes the state of the science. AIA’s Insight pieces are an exception, and, as more literary works, do not have a set structure. Use structure to make your writing process easier, and also to increase your chance that the journal will be interested in the paper. We want to see novel findings and ideas, not experimental writing (tho that may not be true of a literary journal–or of our Insight pieces!–but knowing the usual rules will help you know when and where to break them).
REJECTED! What academic paper rejections are about from both sides of the process
Academic papers are a lot of work. Your research is dear to you. You’ve loved this study enough to see it through, to write it up, to find a home for it. And then you get rejected—perhaps without any indication as to why.
What’s that about? Are you a bad researcher? Was your paper bad? Your research stupid? Should you just give up? Particularly students and others who are new to the process can be devastated by a rejection.
But–really!-there is no need for devastation! Even senior researchers with hundreds of publications are regularly rejected. But it’s easier to deal with rejections when you have had some successes and, importantly, understand better what rejection can mean.
I spend a lot of time on all sides of the academic publication process. I’m an active researcher with studies and papers of my own. I’m a peer reviewer for multiple journals. I’m the Associate Editor of Autism in Adulthood. As an author I’ve been rejected and accepted; as a reviewer I’ve made a full gamut of recommendations; and as an editor I’ve rejected, accepted, and been tormented by decisions for the papers I adjudicate. Here’s the insider scoop on the process and what the rejections could mean.
DISCLAIMER: Science is large. I am a social services intervention researcher working with disability communities. Perspectives from another field (e.g., physics or biology) may vary.
Step 1: Administrative Review
When you submit your paper the first type of review it hits is administrative. This is the check to make sure it’s been formatted properly and it isn’t missing pieces. Often if it doesn’t pass administrative review, the author will get information about what needs to get fixed to resubmit but there’s no official guarantee to that. Bottom line: This is the one part of the process you can control; be sure to follow the instructions for authors carefully.
Step 2: Editorial Review
The journal’s editors read everything that’s sent in. That may be hundreds of articles in a year. They make a decision about whether or not to send the paper to peer review. A lot of things are considered in that decision. Does the topic of the paper fit the journal’s scope? Does the format of the paper fit the types of articles the journal publishes? Is the science sound? Does the paper have the appropriate level of academic depth? Is this reporting on something new; does it advance the science in some way, whether it’s findings or theory/ideas? Do we think it’s worth reviewers’ time; in other words, would we want to publish this in our journal assuming it can be perfected in the review process?
A rejection at this stage is sometimes called a “desk reject.” There are a lot of reasons why this might happen. Some may be because the science is bad, the paper is poorly written, or the ideas are stale. But others may be that it’s just not a good fit for the journal’s scope, the editors were reading too fast and missed how cool it is (hey, we are people who make mistakes like anyone, and we read a lot of submissions!), or it’s a good start to a paper but needs more mentorship and development than we feel we can ask reviewers to provide.
If you get a rejection at this point, don’t get upset. If there are comments given, they could be useful, but more often it’s just a form letter. When I get one of these, I assume that the editors felt it was not a good fit for their journal and re-do the paper for a different journal.
The majority of rejections I have gotten were at this stage. It’s a little irritating because I just want the thing DONE and off my to-do list, but meh. There are a bunch of other journals out there and given the number of considerations going into editorial decisions, there’s zero reason to assume it’s because I suck.
Step 3: Peer Review
If you get to the peer review stage, congratulations! As editors we’re not keen on sending stuff to peer review that we wouldn’t want in the journal, assuming peer review can clean it up.
That said, the whole point of peer review is to go over the paper in excruciating and expert detail to make sure that every part of it is sound before adding it to the literature. Sometimes the reviewers do find fatal flaws in the piece that were not evident on the editors’ quick read. Sometimes it takes an expert to notice a deeper problem.
The journals I work with have an editor in charge of making a final adjudication on the paper, and–if the editor-in-charge decides they want to work with the paper–between two and five peer reviewers. Peer reviewers are selected because they offer specific expertise relevant to your paper. The reviewers give their detailed feedback and assessment of whether to reject, ask for revisions, or accept. The reviewers don’t always agree on if the paper should be accepted. The editor in charge of the manuscript makes the final call.
It is possible to get a rejection from the editor only; this means they did not feel like they could work with the paper in its current state, so they did not engage peer reviewers.
It is possible to get a rejection along with a full set of peer reviewer comments.
It is also possible to get a revise-and-resubmit letter. This might seem like a rejection because it will say something like “…unfortunately we cannot accept the paper in its current form.” HOWEVER, if you are being invited to address reviewer comments and resubmit, you have not been rejected. This is just the next stage of the process of revising the article based on reviewer feedback.
I have never had a paper accepted outright, and I know only a few cases where my colleagues were given “conditional acceptances” (accepted if you make these changes). Most often I am asked to make “major revisions.” Sometimes “minor revisions.” This is totally normal. Note though, that while your chance of being rejected goes down significantly with each of these stages you get through, there is no guarantee you won’t be rejected until you get an official acceptance message.
Reviewer feedback can be annoying, harsh, misinformed, or otherwise painful. The editor in charge may provide guidance if there’s feedback you should ignore, like if there’s a reviewer who just doesn’t get something (like saying that qualitative findings can’t be generalized due to small N, which is a methodologically ignorant statement). The editor-in-charge comments should take precedence over the reviewer comments.
If you are invited to revise and resubmit, as an author, you get a chance to decide if you want to self-reject (or pull). If you feel addressing the reviewer comments would compromise your work, or don’t want to deal, YOU can decide not to submit a revision and take your paper elsewhere. You can also decide to completely re-do it and resubmit it as a new submission to the same journal. While I have never done this, I have considered it before. Or you could address the reviewer comments carefully and submit the revision.
If you are rejected by the journal at any time during the peer review, take a cold look at the comments. They will help you even if they are harsh. Even ignorant comments (like quantitative researchers who don’t understand qualitative methods) can be useful. I keep using that example because it’s one that I’ve gotten repeatedly. It’s taught me to always put a sentence in my papers that says something like, “As a qualitative study, we were not seeking to generalize to a population, but to gain an in-depth understanding of a wide range of individual experiences.” I stopped getting bad reviews about my N for qualitative studies after doing that.
It is true–your paper might suck. Your research idea might be flawed, your work might have been done before and you just hadn’t found the papers already written on it. BUT!
- That does not mean you suck and should give up. It means you learned something and can move on with better knowledge and skill.
- It also means that you are saved the embarrassment and damage of it getting published and then getting huge backlash from the rest of your peers in the field when they see it. Better to know before it is made public than after.
It is also true that your paper may have been just fine and the peer reviewers sucked. Instead of getting upset, ask yourself some critical questions:
- Was the writing unclear? It may be your technical communications skills that need to be honed, not your scientific ones. Becoming a better writer is a win. Or maybe the reviewers were poor readers.
- Were the reviewers ignorant or coming from the wrong paradigm for your work? Reviewers aren’t always right, or don’t always support the kind of work you do. If this is the case, you can try the paper elsewhere. It probably wasn’t a good fit for the journal and you probably don’t want your paper there anyway. (I have recommended rejection of papers on ethical grounds before, even if the science was rigorous.)
- Are there actually major problems? Truly? I’ve knee-jerked to reviewer comments before, dismissed them, and then a day or two later had a long, hard think and realized that even though the comment was written pretty brutally, the reviewer had a very good point.
- Do you need to find a mentor / get a second opinion? The papers I have to reject most often come from students who have written wonderful student papers that lack the depth of a publishable academic paper. My role as a reviewer or editor is not to mentor them on their science, even though my heart breaks sometimes stumbling over that boundary. Consider going over your review notes with a more senior scientist, or a peer in your field. Not just for students–I go over review notes with my mentors and peers too. Others can help put things in perspective.
Last Thoughts:
Rejection happens to everyone. Think of it as part of your scientific journey, life-long learning, and intellectual challenge. Also think of it as your initiation into the club of every other researcher in the whole world ever ’cause we get stuff rejected too, all the time 🙂
Good luck <3
Trust & what it takes to get there
Someone recently asked me what it would take for me to feel good about Autism Speaks, a large, wealthy organization that has done repeated and significant damage to autistic people and has claimed a desire to change. My first reaction was, not my fucking weight to carry. They have to figure it out. I’ve already had enough burden from them, between fighting their stigmatizing media and hate messages directly, and dealing with the discrimination and misinformation aftermath indirectly. It’s not my job to soothe my oppressor; it’s their job to soothe me.
But as the days went by, I realized that I did know the answer to the question, because as a community based participatory researcher who stands on the academic side, no matter how intersectional I am, I have a lot of power and privilege. And academic researchers have abused that power and privilege, and harmed people; ours (human subjects research) is not a pretty history. Maybe I didn’t do those harms personally, but they are a part of the legacy of every researcher out there, and abuses persist. I work inside a system of oppression. I do not presume–ever–when I walk into a meeting with community collaborators that they will trust me not to continue that oppression just because I say that I’m on their side.
Sharing power and building trust is slow and deliberate. It means listening, and getting out of the way, giving space for others. It means giving them more space than I give myself, because as the person with the educational and socio-economic privilege, I’m already given more space than them as a matter of unconscious routine on the part of society. It means following through on the community’s recommendations–not once, not twice, not whining “oh I’m trying”–but over and over and over again, every time. It means that if I can’t follow through, or shouldn’t follow through, I have a transparent discussion with the community as to why, and get their ideas about alternative actions that might work just as well. Over and over. It takes time and it takes love. It takes a willingness to be pushed back on and maybe even yelled at. And if I do all that, and more, then maybe–MAYBE–I can expect to start being trusted six months or a year into the project. And that’s without having any personal history of not being trustworthy. That’s with the small amount of built-in trust for my intersectionality and history of disability and queer rights activism. That’s with the project being something the community asked for in the first place.
Autism Speaks has a recent history of raw, tangible hurt. Many of us are actively living the consequences of that hurt right now. Yes, the first step is admitting to having caused the hurt. But just saying, “we want to do better” and “look we did a thing you wanted us to do!” is not an instant recipe for “oh, awesome, now you’re my ally!” The fact is, building–or rebuilding–trust takes work, time, listening, backing down, making space, changing behavior, giving up power, accepting responsibility (even if it was someone else’s actions, you still chose to pick up their work instead of going elsewhere), doing things that might piss off your sponsors or make your life hard, and time: time, time, time, time.
So the answer to the question: What will it take for me to feel good about Autism Speaks? An extended number of years (five, ten, twenty? this isn’t set, but it will be more than one or two) with continuous evidence that they are listening to and following through with the community’s recommendations, every time. Every. Time. This can be done, seriously. Long-term evidence of continuous power sharing and willingness to engage in potentially painful (including possibly financially) change. Transparency about decisions to go against community wishes. All of those things that go into building trust with the people who you–or your field of work–have historically oppressed. There is no quick fix. There is listening, sharing, changing, hard changing, even harder changing, work, time, tears, love, harsh introspection, and more work, work, and time, time, time.
Authentic Inclusion in Autism Research
My essay on “Authentic Inclusion in Autism Research” is up on the Organization for Autism Research’s (OAR) newsletter. Many thanks to OAR for inviting me to write about some my favorite things.
INSAR 2018 Narratives of Autism and Skilled Employment: Barriers, Facilitators, and Considerations in Professional Settings
Some very preliminary findings from my autism and skilled employment project, from INSAR.
Citation:
Raymaker, D.M., Scharer, M., Nicolaidis, C., AASPIRE team. (May, 2018). Narratives of Autism and Skilled Employment: Barriers, Facilitators, and Considerations in Professional Settings. Poster Presentation. International Society for Autism Research, Rotterdam.
Public Health PDX Style – Neurodiversity: Rethinking Autism
I gave a ten minute TED-style speech at the OHSU/PSU School of Public Heath’s series Public Health PDX Style on Neurodiversity: Rethinking Autism. Due to tech issues in the livestream, part the speech was not recorded. Below is the transcript of the speech in full. The recorded portions of the event can be found here; the second half of the recording is in the comments to that post.
Hi there, I’m here tonight because I’m a research assistant professor at Portland State University in the School of Social Work, where I lead community-engaged social service intervention research to improve outcomes for people with disabilities. I have connections to the school of public health, and to my colleagues Christina and Katie, and when this program asked Katie to do a talk on autism, she thought of me because I’m one of her academic connections with expertise in the area.
But, really, I’m here because of the neurodiversity movement, and our successes at shifting narratives about disability over the past few decades, because when I first heard the term “neurodiversity,” no one would have considered it to have a connection with public health at all, much less have wanted an autistic person to come speak about it. In fact, few people would have considered an autistic person worth listening to at all. I remember a reviewer on a federal grant in 2010 rejecting a proposal Christina and I put in for a healthcare study with autistic adults because, quote, “there is not adequate evidence that the self-reports of individuals on the autism spectrum are valid or reliable.”
But, really, I’m here because I survived the first few decades of my life which were threatened not just because I was weird and disabled, but because I was non-hetero and non-gender conforming in that special time of the eighties when young people were being pushed off bridges to their deaths for the same in the next town over. I’m here because I was fortunate to have a family who valued my strangeness and supported my fumblings, and because I found community with other artists, queers, neurodivergent and disabled people, and fabulous freaks. And we protested and resisted, and drew bodies in chalk on the steps of city hall, and refused to have someone else tell us what we couldn’t do. And we protected each other from bulling and internalized oppression. I’m here tonight because I’ve been fortunate to find spaces where my diversity is valued and my disabilities supported, places like PSU, where I can do research to make better outcomes for the next generation of mes.
More practically though, I’m here to fill in a bit about what neurdiversity is and give a sketch of where we’ve come from as a movement, where we are currently, and what our call to action is in the future. Because how everyone, me, you, as individuals and as a society, think about autism has really important consequences to the life outcomes of autistic people.
So, what the hell is neurodiversity and why should you care about it?
Think for a moment about biodiversity. Biodiversity is good because it ensures ecosystems can bounce back from disasters, that there are multiple pathways to ecosystem survival, increased individual and collective resilience. It leads to biological “innovation” or ecological solutions that work past problems, or disease, and the whole environment can get healthier.
Neurodiversity is that with brains. Neuro instead of bio. Brain-diversity. Which gets ecosystems of societies all those good diversity things. Many different ways of thinking enables resilient communities, innovation and cultural growth, greater ***public health***.
The idea of neurodiversity can be traced to the disability rights movement in the 1990’s, which drew, and still does draw, much of its inspiration from the civil rights movement. Coming as I did from the gay rights movement, too, there are definitely parallels there. It’s all about human rights, right. The autistic rights movement is probably the largest specific disability or sub-group within neurodiversity, but the term is used to cover all the different kinds of brains. At its heart, neurodiversity is a term coined by us, for us, and is connected to our call to action for increased disability and human rights.
Neurodiversity is also for many of us connected to our identities as disabled people. Neurodivergent. I am autistic and neurodivergent. I’m guessing at least a few people have been cringing at me saying, “I am autistic.” So I want to back up a little with that. Shouldn’t I call myself “person with autism?” Shouldn’t I be separating the disability from my personness—isn’t it “correct” to always put the person first? I’d like to trouble that idea. I’d like to give you the neurodiversity perspective which is that it’s only important to separate the person from the thing if there is something bad or shameful about the thing. No one says, “I’m a person with maleness,” or “I’m a person with Americanness.” So from our perspective, putting identity first is a way of resisting narratives of stigma and shame around autism and disability, around brain diversity. I want to make it very clear, every individual person with a disability will have a preferred way they like to identify themselves, and you should use that individual’s preferred language, always, without lecture, especially if you’re not disabled yourself. But for those of us who take our neurodivergence as identity, as part of what makes us a person, to say, “I am neurodivergent, I am autistic,” chips away at stigma. Chips away at existing social narratives of shame and disease that lead to discrimination, reduced opportunities, that then lead to negative outcomes like unemployment, internalized stigma, greater chance of suicidality, vulnerably to violence, public health concerns, right?
It’s a long game.
Neurodiversity is also about community. I wasn’t part of the neurodiversity community when it first developed because at that time I’d never heard of autism. Autism wasn’t even in the DSM until a decade after I was born, and the first time I heard it applied to me was when co-workers at the tech company where I was highly valued–yet for some reason never allowed to speak with clients–just assumed I had already been diagnosed. But I was able to find the neurodiversity community pretty quickly after that online, and it resonated with me. It was, again, like my friends who helped me survive my twenties, a group of fabulous freaks keeping each other safe. Community is a protective factor. It is a facilitator of health.
I want to bring up one last shift in how you might think about autism. In disability studies and social science we have various models of disability; two big ones are the “medical” model and the “socio-ecological” model. The medical model is still prevalent in health services, and treats disability as a disease or flaw within an individual that needs to be cured. The socio-ecological model, instead, sees disability as the result of a mis-match between a person’s needs and their environment–a mismatch that comes about because the needs of the majority are already being accommodated. By changing the environment the “disabling” conditions go away–case in point, tonight’s ASL interpreters–if we were somewhere most people were Deaf, we might instead need to provide hearing folks with noise reducing ear muffs to drown out the random sounds in the room that wouldn’t bother anyone else. Creating a more accommodating environment doesn’t make the impairment go away, and not all impairments can be accommodated. But it’s certainly a nice way to provide supports for better life outcomes without compromising all of that good stuff that comes of diversity.
So some of you may be thinking, shit, I’m not neurodivergent, although I really wish I was! And others of you may be thinking, I have a different brain, but I’m not interested in making it part of my identity, that’s just not me. That’s cool. There are still ways the idea can be really useful to you as a doctor, a researcher, a family member, a member of society at large. Because you don’t need to take on an identity or join a civil rights movement to apply the idea of neurodiversity more academically to your daily life. You can use it as a lens in how you see your patients, your friends, that person on the bus who doesn’t make eye contact and rocks. You can use it as a check-and-balance when wondering “should I try to ‘fix’ this behavior, or is it okay to let it be?” You can use it in your public health research to consider how health issues and outcomes for autistic people might be about marginalization rather than medical dysfunction.
So here’s my call to action for you all tonight. If you’re already a part of the movement, keep at the work. Social systems are huge and complex and take a long time to change. But we’re in a much better place tonight than we were ten years ago, fighting to convince someone we even existed at all. If you’re new to neurodiversity, think about it as a paradigm shift. Use it to challenge your assumptions about autism, and to consider both how neurodiversity contributes to healthier communities and how the way we, as a society think about autism effects the lives of those of us who identify as on the spectrum. Thank you all for being a part of this conversation.
Neurodiverse Working Relationships Podcast
My friend and colleague Christina Nicolaidis and I are featured on Spectrumly Speaking’s podcast, talking about neurodiverse working relationships. Spectrumly Speaking is a podcast about and for women on the autism spectrum.
Announcing Autism in Adulthood, a New Peer-Reviewed Journal
Autism in Adulthood is a new peer-reviewed journal from MaryAnn Liebert Inc, Publishers, led by Editor-in-Chief Christina Nicolaidis, MD, MPH and Associate Editor, Dora Raymaker, PhD, along with other leading researchers, autistic community leaders, and practitioners. We are now accepting submissions to the preview issue of this new interdisciplinary journal. We are looking for original research, in-depth analysis, advances in methodology, literature reviews and meta-analyses, and perspectives including essays, editorials, research agendas, and personal perspectives.
Autism in Adulthood is the home for research and scholarship on the most pressing issues affecting adults on the autism spectrum, from emerging adulthood to later life. Using original research, in-depth analysis, and inter-professional dialogue, Autism in Adulthood provides new insights and evidence to promote practice, systems, and policy change. This innovative journal integrates the contributions of autistic adults – as Editorial Board members, authors, peer-reviewers, and readers – into the peer-reviewed literature.
Deadline 12/31 for the preview issue, but submissions after that date will roll over into consideration for publication in the regular journal.